Goodheart writes with disarming gentleness throughout, but his memoir is a forlorn reminder that the Great Books do not...
A literary critic reflects on his career in the elite circles of the academy, his tenuous connection to Jewish identity, and the vicissitudes of age.
Although Goodheart (Humanities/Brandeis) has little that is strikingly unique to say about his childhood (in a politically progressive family during the 1930s and ’40s) or his initiation into the intellectual scene of the 1950s, his account treats the usual themes—the gradual erosion of his identification with Judaism, as well as the drama of the “golden age” of Columbia University—with humor and some sensitivity. His memoir is most successful, in fact, as an account of a vanished academic world, in which bright young men could step almost effortlessly into more or less prestigious sinecures, and students, campus staff, and wives seemed to exist only to serve the scholars in their pursuit of their calling. He depicts the imperiousness of the prominent Formalist critics and the ironies of his own “conversion” from his family’s socialist idealism to the decidedly apolitical critical approaches then in vogue with some sensitivity. At the same time, casual references to relocating his (unnamed) wife as he climbed the career ladder from job to job are disconcerting, hinting at but never exploring the human cost of the professorial privilege that he enjoyed. A similar mix of self-consciousness and evasion pervades his discussion of a critic’s political obligations. “My mind swung between the poles of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other,’ ” Goodheart confides, but the effect is less existential doubt than waffling. The philosophical ruminations that follow, pondering “the perils of no convictions” have the texture of a magazine article stretched to chapter length, offering broad generalizations about “people on the left,” conservatives, and postmodernists—but little analysis of specific positions or arguments. The last two chapters mourn the indignities of his own late middle age and his mother’s old age: physical deterioration, alienation, and loneliness.
Goodheart writes with disarming gentleness throughout, but his memoir is a forlorn reminder that the Great Books do not necessarily provide moral compasses or solace for the human condition.Pub Date: May 29, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-146-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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